PERFORMERS off-the-wall things.” — ------------------------------------- ----------------— ByBudScoppa ____________________________ 66 V really thought maybe I’d have to die first,” Randy Newman told Rolling Stone upon I learning he d made it into the Rock and Roll Hall of-Fame twenty years after becoming eligible for induction. “I didn’t think it would happen if it didn’t happen, you know, a little earlier. But this is great. I’m really glad it happened when I was still around to see it.” All things being equal, Newman wasn’t exactly a slam-dunk to make the cut. The L A native (he grew up in the Pacific Palisades) was never part of any scene or movement. He didn t hang out with Joni in Laurel Canyon or Neil in Topanga. He didn’t rub elbows with Jackson Browne and the Eagles at the Troubadour bar. On top of that, his best-known songs were cut by other, more high-profile acts — and he’s more comfortable with an orchestra than a guitar. “Really, for the medium, I picked an odd sort o f style,” he admitted. “To do that [first] album with [an] orchestra, as if I was on another planet, as if I’d never heard the Rolling Stones.” Like Rodney Dangerfield, Randy can’t get no respect. He was zero for fifteen in Oscar nominations before winning the Best Song award for “If I Didn’t Have You,” from Monsters Inc., in 2002. It moved me more than I’d thought it would, because the orchestra stood up,” he later told a journalist. “The people I’d always wanted to respect me, it was clear that they did. O r maybe it was just because I hired them.” Randy is not one to blow his own horn. “I have no particular discipline on my own,” he claimed. “I got pushed into everything I did.” That would include writing songs, per­ forming them (“I thought I’d regret it ten or fifteen years from now if I didn’t,” he said), and “Songwriting is a really difficult process - bends you out of shape. I don’t particularly enjoy any part of it, but I keep doing it anyway.’’ That stuff was formative for me,” Newman recalled. “I heard it and I loved it — and that was it. It was all there pretty quick: Carole King knew the chords and used them; that’s why her stuff was so good. I never had a hero - maybe my Uncle Alfred - but she was someone I emulated when I was a kid, trying to write like that. But I couldn’t do it.” he third person to shepherd Randy toward his des- T tiny was his lifelong friend and eventual producer, Lenny Waronker, a showbiz kid whose father, Si, ran Liberty Records. “Lenny was [two years] older than me, and he was interested,” said Randy. “He suggested I write songs, and he would take me to see Lou Adler when I was 16 or 17. Wfe’d go to New York; we met Leiber and Stoller very early on. He knew people and would talk to ’em. I didn’t know anybody, and I didn t have that kind of drive. Lenny was my ambition. He provided it for years.jflj| The way Newman sees it, Waronker was responsible for his entire career. It was Lenny who got Randy a gig as a writer at M etric Music, Liberty’s publishing arm. “I always wrote slightly off-the-wall things,” he said. “But I did write a couple THIS PAGE, FROM that had hooks that Gene Pitney had hits with in England. TOP: Young Randy And my publisher, Aaron Schroeder, was so happy. But then practicing in 1954; with Lenny Waronker, I stopped; it didn’t interest me, really.” 1966. W hat did interest Newman was creating characters and putting words in their mouths. His epiphany occurred while he was writing what would become “Simon Smith and the Procul Ha rum ft Strings & Paul McCartney ft Wings eventually getting into the family business of composing for film (“because o f economics,” he explained). A nd yet, these reluctantly initiated undertakings have yielded more than Bandy Newman Mick's Birthday! The Wired, The Amazing Dylan! Andy! Zsa Zsa! Wired World their share of sustained bursts of inspiration, collectively Human Tnuaan! Terry! Tennessee! o f Snorts Woody! Ahmet! Princess loo! P comprising an altogether brilliant body of work. The first person to yank young Randy out of his pro­ fessed chronic lethargy was his uncle, legendary film composer Alfred Newman, who initiated the kid into the workings of the orchestra on the 20th Century Fox soundstage. The second was the family housekeeper, who tuned the household radio to L A ’s rhythm & blues and gospel stations, giving Randy a taste of Big Joe Turner, Big Jay McShann, and other lightning rods on the flip side of a soon-to-be-transformed Top Forty, whose Tour Hit Parade of bland fruits were sampled by many a mid-century suburban family - including the Newmans - every Saturday night. That initial immersion led the teenage Randy to fall in love with Ray Charles, Fats Domino, and the witty» gritty records being turned out by the songwriting/ producing team o f Jerry Leiber and M ike Stoller. narrowed slit of his mouth, vibrating his taut lips; this unconscious technique gives him a toothless, rubbery sound.” As he told me, he found performing “scary, a little, but not as scary as writing.” Between 1968 and 1983, he recorded seven studio albums full of character- driven, satirical songs: his self-titled debut; the consecutive masterworks 12 Songs (1970), Sail Away (1972), and Good Old Boys (1974); the “breakout8 album Little Criminals (1977), contain­ ing his lone hit single, the widely mis­ understood study of intolerance, “Short People”; Born Again (1979), graced by a cover portrait of the artist in Kiss makeup; and 1983’s Trouble in Paradise, which yielded the similarly misconstrued “I Love L A .” Newman in Amsterdam, 1975 For the most part, his songs during the Warner Bros, phase were obliquely confronting mixtures of puns, pathos, and skewed takes on the cliches of the melodramatic pop music of an earlier era. ‘I never thought my stuff was hard Some, like “Yellow Man,” “Political Science,” and “Rednecks,” for people to understand.” make it relatively easy on the listener by imposing a clear point of view - their narrators are bigoted simpletons. Other songs, like the melodically beautiful but lyrically hackneyed “I’ll Be Home,” are more psychologically complex, demand­ Amazing Dancing Bear,” in 1965. Letting his imagination run ing that the listener decide how to take overused phrases wild, he transformed a conventional pop song into a fanciful like “Remember, baby/You can always count on me.” Do you character sketch. “It started as a song for Frank Sinatra Jr.,” laugh at the narrator s self-delusion, or do you let yourself be he explains. “It had a girl’s name - ‘Cathy, Cathy, Cathy, dab affected by his desire to be true, no matter how futile? “Love dabdah’ - and I just couldn’t stand it. So I just thought of Story’ begins as just that, but gradually moves past young ‘bear,’ looking for a rhyme for that, ‘wear,’ ‘stare,’ and contin­ love, through settling down” to family life, and finally to an ued — really continued, till now. So I completely disappeared.” old people’s home, where ‘W e ’ll play checkers all day/Till w e Translation: From that moment onward, his voice became pass away.” W hoa. those of the characters he created. But why did he decide to become an artist? “A t first I was Pewmap s best songs ponder the human comedy in an shocked by how far away the final versions were from what I I even-handed, compassionate way, even when then- had envisioned when I was writing the songs, and it got to the subjects are deeply flawed. While talking to Barney Hoskyns point where I couldn’t stand to hear myself complaining all in 2003 about the twisted love ballad “Marie,” from Good Old the time,” he explained to journalist Terry Staunton in 2008. Boys, Newman said of its narrator, “Yeah, he means what he’s He had offers from Warner Bros, and A6?M based on saying. He does love her. But he can’t say it unless he’s drunk. his song demos for Metric. Early on, he hadn’t even sung It’s more interesting to me when it’s something like that, I his demos himself, ceding that task to RJ. Proby and Jackie gotta admit. There’s just more going on. There is all that extra DeShannon. He hadn t played on a bunch of them, either, stuff you know about the guy.. Sometimes I’ll take a little because Leon Russell was also around. “So I was like as back­ tiny thing, like the guy who loves ELO on ‘The Story of a ward as you could be,” he says. “I was gonna sign w ith Afe?M Rock and Roll Band’ [from Born Again] but gets it all wrong.” because they offered me $10,000, and Lenny” - by then, an “I never thought my stuff was that hard for people to A6?R man at Warners - “was really pissed off. So I got War­ understand,” Randy told me. “The thing is, it requires you to ners to offer me at least that and I signed with them.” listen, and not come in halfway or be eatin’ a potato chip.” In the thirty ensuing years, he’s made three albums of e wais a less than natural performer, as I noted after newly written songs - Land o f Dreams (1988), Bad Love watching him do a solo show at the Bitter End in 1971: H (1999), and Harps and Angels (2008).